Changing the Mood
It's probably been a bit too long since I put anything new up. Even though I've got only tenuous ties to the region at best, I've found myself drawn to the coverage of the hurricane in Louisiana and Mississippi. I've been hitting those links in the previous post pretty often to keep up with what's going on, but I'm not involved with the situation in any other way. I've been going along with my normal activities--work, seeing friends, going out--as usual without any change due to the storm. So if it hasn't directly affected my life particularly (although I noticed one gas station raise its price per gallon by 18 cents between 1:00 yesterday afternoon and 7:30 last night), and if I don't have much new to say about the subject, why do I still have the feeling that it would be inappropriate to blog about anything else?
Maybe it's not so much that any other subjects would be inappropriate as that it's just difficult to follow a post about the devastation on the gulf coast with something lighter. Perhaps I need to wade back in to other material more slowly. We'll see if my mood shifts a bit with this post--it might jostle the topic just enough to allow a change of subject.
posted by Doug @ 6:11 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I know exactly what you mean Doug. I think what keeps me from being able to distract myself with anything else is the uneasy knowledge that the danger for so many is still imminent and growing. That's what gets me. Most natural disasters are over about as soon as they start, and then we look at the destruction and count the casualties. The way back usually starts right after. But this nightmare is ongoing. They can't even get a handle on the major threat and now people are tossing around very high casualty predictions, the kind that would not just surpass 9/11 but dwarf it in that regard. Hopefully more people got out than many believe.
Contrasting the reactions to NO and 911 could prove fascinating and give you grist for your blogging mill.
Both disasters struck diverse US urban centers. One looks on the surface like “man-made” disaster, the other a “natural disaster.” But the waters are muddy. I think Rush Limbaugh is right, this storm is going to be politicized. Lurking concerns about the Bush administration’s dismissal of science as nothing more than a political point of view and its ever-sunny “if we just believe in something hard enough it can come true” political philosophy are about to be seriously questions in the wake of Katrina. OK, so we defunded levee defense to pay for Homeland Security. How good an idea was that? We’ve rolled back wetlands protection and apparently filled in wetland around NO, favoring development over environment. 911 could be blamed on foreign terrorists, NO can only be blamed on God … or his representative down here on Earth, George Bush.
What does it mean to politicize the situation? I'll agree that it's inappropriate to use this to mindlessly bash the President. But he and his administration are partly responsible for setting up conditions that allowed this disaster to happen, and they're certainly responsible for the lackluster response after the fact, so acknowledging that responsibility and its consequences may be a political act, but it's not a partisan political act. We should give the policies and decisions that led to this dire situation the same response the President is willing to give the looters: zero tolerance. (And that goes for anybody involved from either party. To name but one example, Congressional Democrats who blithely went along with the gutting of the Army Corps of Engineers budget to reinforce the levees deserve as much blame as those who cut the budget in the first place.)
The only quibble that one might have about this is when it's appropriate to examine which parts of the disaster. If there's a price owed by those who ignored this catastrophe in the making, they should be made to pay it.
I'm digging the screeds, like Hunter's over on DailyKos
Here' a bit:
"Oh, we've seen politicization of disaster. Every Republican campaign for the last four years has revolved around the politicization of disaster."
Post a Comment
<< Home